Marketing With Purpose | 41 Orange Blog

With information readily available for any future customer, it’s important to understand where your ideal customers are within the buyer’s journey. By utilizing SEO, blogging, and social media, you’re targeting customers at the right moment, message, making it much more likely that they’re going to hear your message.

Each stage has its own unique challenges, and here are a few techniques on how to capture your leads attention during each stage:

Searching for a way to take your B2B online marketing up a notch in efficiency and efficacy? Instead of leaning into cold calls/emails or putting all of your eggs into trade shows or networking, consider leveraging the potential of authentic networking via LinkedIn groups.

Nowhere else on the internet can you find a better-qualified group of prospects to engage for B2B marketing. Previously we wrote about how to get business from LinkedIn in less than 25 minutes per day. Part of that strategy is getting involved in LinkedIn Groups. You can use participation in the right groups to feed the top of your sales funnel with the best possible fuel: those people most likely to engage with your content, appreciate your offerings, and develop into satisfied customers.

Let's dive in! We're going to use real estate as our example industry here, but know that there are groups for virtually any industry or vertical.

The social media landscape has changed. Just a few years ago, marketers were able to build an audience, push out content, and know that it would reach everyone. Now, that's no longer the case. With Instagram, Facebook, and other social networks leaning on increasingly opaque algorithms, brands need to be smarter if they want to make social media work for them.

All the cool kids are using Instagram, but if you are a B2B marketer, you might think that you don't need to be up on this popular social media app. This would be a mistake.

Instagram allows you to share photos and 15-second videos with your followers. It is a great way to promote visual content about your brand with the world.

When you think about it, marketing to businesses is really directed at the people who work at those businesses. These people are looking to solve problems, fulfill needs and meet challenges. Instagram is just another way for you to showcase how your products and services can help.

Best of all, since Instagram is used for social sharing and B2C marketing, your posts will reach your followers when they are not in work mode. This allows you to present a more fun and playful side to your brand. By making a more personal connection with your followers, you can cultivate long-term business relationships and alliances -- and perhaps even attract new leads.

It is very likely that someone has already told you that blogging is a good idea. Blogs are a good way to let your customers and prospects know about your products, your brand, and get to know and trust the people behind your company.

However, a blog alone is not going to attract the traffic you need to reach your goals for revenues and profits. Once your blog posts are written, they will not magically reach the audience you want. In fact, they might not reach any audience. That's where social media promotion comes in.

You might be saying, "But Sam, we already post all our content on Facebook and Twitter. What more do you want?"

To which I would reply, "Yes! That's great, but what else are you doing?" -- Do I hear crickets?

Here's what's up: A study conducted by KissMetrics found sharing content at least three times on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ increase shares more than 100 percent. If you're not sharing your content everywhere you can, multiple times, then you're doing social media promotion all wrong.